“Mr. Vice President, I am Speaking”
Kamala Harris, Vice President Elect, United States 2020
«El monólogo del hombre no me alivia ni de mis sufrimientos ni de mis pensamientos. ¿Por qué he resignarme a repetirlo? Tengo otra cosa que expresar. Otros dolores, otros sentimientos han destrozado mi vida, otras alegrías la han iluminado desde hace siglos”
Silvina Ocampo, Argentine writer and poet
“…la amistad entre un hombre y una mujer y el intercambio de ideas
entre ellos es tal vez el único medio de adquirir, de los fenómenos que nos
rodean, un concepto que no peque de unilateral. Las interpretaciones del
mundo que cada sexo se forja, lejos de ser antagónicas, se complementan
hasta abarcar las distintas fases del prisma de la verdad…”
Amanda Labarca, citada por Patricia Pinto, 1989
“(Garcilaso) No puede, ni mucho menos quiere, olvidar la lengua india
de su madre, que es donde se encuentra el ser huaca de la piedra
cuzqueña. Tampoco puede olvidar el español paterno, que es donde
encuentra el valor de moneda absoluta a que apunta la misma piedra en
la otra cultura. Ambas son lenguas suyas, ambas lo rigen. Y de aquí
viene la característica formal central del mestizo: circula interminablemente
entre las dos culturas, y no puede suscitar una sin que, de alguna
manera la otra, la que desde siempre ha estructurado como opuesta, sea
suscitada conjuntamente”
Jorge Guzmán, Contra el Secreto Profesional
“Mucho pone quien pone espíritu
y voltea las entrañas pesadas de las criaturas.
Pero este tiempo que vivimos es del hombre y de la mujer
con los dos hemisferios, el emocional y el activo.”
Escritos Políticos, Gabriela Mistral.
Introduction
Language is essential within our human characteristics. Language, along with other elements, give us the status of persons. Human beings with capacities, emotions, feelings and expectations; language translates our ability to communicate through a specific way and manifests our deepest components.
Language, by default, is one of the main tools for the construction of realities. This is a builder and des-constructor of the ideological, philosophical and material world that surrounds us, and has an absolute penetration in the most relevant areas of culture and daily life.
Language has historically been associated with “feminine” and / or “masculine” characteristics. Its development has been linked and its value stereotyped, according to “who speaks”, “how it speaks” and “from where it is spoken”. Unfortunately, for decades and by action or omission, society has validated as a language with value, the model of the masculine language, the masculine and patriarchal logos, the model of the “male speaking” and we have relegated, for the most part, to a private sphere, minor, intimate, secondary, the language developed by women.
Linguists, sociologists, academics and social scientists have established, especially in recent decades, important advances in the study and analysis of language as a “gender model” with the consequences that this has, in all areas of human life. they have ceased to be “academic isolated” and today their validation, space, development is the majority. Changing from that perspective has been slow, complex and fraught with difficult, but today, the voice of women achieves the necessary place to complete a global analysis.
Today, the word implemented and defended by women, assumes an indisputable role, impossible to question. The objective of the analysis will be to review the central elements of this social change and establish the main points to understand how the “only valid linguistic model”, understood, the one developed by men, has ceased to be, really the only one and has been deconstructed to the light of reality, consolidating today, in a role equivalent to that of female voices.
My interest in this analysis runs, at least, in two directions, the first, to put into perspective the relevance of the electoral triumph of the last elections that places, for the first time, a woman in the position of Vice President, with the enormous consequences that this may have. Second, the transcendental significance of the use and abuse of sexist language in the context of public and private spaces.
How this change has matured in the public and private world and how today it has its own path is demonstrated in the light of day. Women don’t need interpreters or second ranks. The evidence of that powerful light, which emerges as the voice in the bodies, faces, souls and heads of women, is the central point of this analysis.
“It’s a Girl! (…) I’m a Boy! There we lay, innocent of a distinction -between a female object and male subject- that would shape our destinies”.[1] Beauvior points out with unbeatable eloquence: “humanity is male, and man defines woman, not in her self, but in relation with himself”[2]
The sources used are secondary analyzes related to the thesis, which represent some of the most significant turning points in gender linguistic analysis. The analysis will also contemplate some examples of “Spanish-speaking female voices” in order to integrate in a real way the linguistic, ideological and social perception and experience of “different women”, different hemispheres and different worldviews and backgrounds.
Analysis
On November 3, Kamala Harris[3] signed her name with fire in the history of the United States, but also in the history of women, of the West, of globalization. She became the first woman to hold the position of Vice President, she will be Madam Vice President. It is not a minor issue. This is a giant step in the direction of equal rights, equal opportunity, equal pay, equal VOICE. Certainly, she got there, because of the previous work done by many, thousands, here and outside of this country. Thousands of women who throughout the decades worked for the right to vote, for the right to abortion, for equal pay, for shared family responsibilities, for the right to have a VOICE.
In fact, in an indispensable and complementary point to our object of analysis; this new moment, would be the best of the opportunities, so that the Amendment of Equal Rights (ERA)[4] is approved as an Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. It would be a necessary leveling off in terms of rights, opportunities and equality.
“Mr. Vice President, I am Speaking”
Kamala Harris, Vice President-elect, United States 2020
VP debate, 2020 election campaign[5]
Kamala Harris allows us to place our analysis in the right space. She will put her VOICE, as a voice in equal conditions in a mostly male world. Warm tones are a minority in the midst of hundreds of ties. That is the importance of your triumph. Her arrival at the White House is, above all, a sign of normalization, of complete vision and of genres in the plural not singular.
This fact is a milestone because it is abnormal. This is what Simone de Beauvoir refers to in her text The Second Sex. Beauvoir is probably the most important philosophy that the Western tradition has given in terms of the study of matters of gender and feminism. It is fair and necessary to place her as a teacher, existentialist philosophy, novelist, chronicler, social theorist, with an enormous influence in the feminist philosophical sphere from all analytical spectra.
Simone de Beauvoir’s “The Second Sex” is a remarkable book. It is not an activist pamphlet, as some mistakenly believe. It is more a philosophical text about the treatment of women throughout history and about the condition of “woman.” She famously writes “One is not born, but rather becomes, woman.”[6] This statement appears contradictory at first glance, but upon reflection makes great deal of sense. The book is divided into two volumes. The first volume deals with Beauvoir’s conception that woman is the “Other” and that “Other” as it relates to women, is different from “other” as it relates other oppressed groups. The second volume deals with societal imposed distinctions between boys and girls and men and women and how such distinctions impact both sexes.
This is a central point since this “other” is basically more than half of the world. When society endorses, it is customary or understood as “normal” that its majority and essential section is treated as “other”, its status as an equal is subtracted, its personal value is diminished and it is made invisible. The result that is generated is that of a mutilated world, which uses its other part as “cheap and dumb labor”
Beauvior argues that humanity is male, and man defines woman. These are very profound statements because they call into questions our preconceived notion of women. The book reflects the rigor of a first-class scholar. She draws on Hegel’s master-slave dialectic and questions Engels explanation of women and their place in history. She acknowledges Marxist influence but is not a follower of the Marxist view of women in history in its entirety.
She adopts a tone of absolute confidence regarding her logical, analytical, and factual line of argument. She conveys this argument directly and with multiple examples for her audience, Second Sex readers and others interested in the subject of feminist theory, gender, predetermined social roles and the predominance of a “social model” as unique and valid.
Matt Viser[7] in his recent article in The Washington Post, “Trump, Biden and masculinity in the age of coronavirus”[8] addresses the topic of the notion of “manliness” has impacted by American foreign policy because there is a macho oriented attitude in the creation and implementation of American foreign policy which is a byproduct of machismo in American society and argues that “efforts by Trump and his supporters to cast him as the manliest of men, conflating masculinity and strength and engaging in a dispute of sorts with Joe Biden over the meaning of machismo.”[9] The article goes on to say that a Fox News reporter equated wearing a mask with carrying a purse, a sign of femininity and therefore weakness. This issue of machismo has made its way into U.S. foreign policy decision making because it is an integral part of American culture.
He supports this claim with background like this: Physicality was also a part of the 2016 election when then candidate Donald Trump accused Hillary Clinton of being weak and sick; the subtext being that she had three strikes against her: she was a woman, sick and weak. Although I would not go as far as to attribute Trump’s victory exclusively to American machismo, I believe it was a contributing factor. Machismo and sexism are so entrenched in American culture that they even exist in intellectual circles.
Viser’s purpose is put into perspective the constant “macho” within the national and foreign politics of the United States and how the factor of “masculinity” has played a determining role throughout history. Understanding “masculinity” not only as a biological or social issue, but mainly cultural. That is, like language, the voice has determined the roles, spaces, levels of participation and discrimination between the participation of men and women in the public space. These are clear manifestations of gender and masculinity as part of American policy decision making.
Most people are familiar with the Norman Mailer/Susan Sontag dispute in 1971 when Sontag told Mailer to “stop calling her a lady writer.”[10] Here was a pillar of the American literary class, author of such novels as The Naked and the Death (1948) and The Executioner’s Song (1979), openly displaying his machismo when moderating a debate about feminist writers.
Norman Mailer and Susan Sontag represent, in both genres, the most enlightened segments of the classic progressive intellectual current in the United States. It is important to point out this, because it serves to illustrate how macho language, conscious or not, is not a subject of exclusive use within the conservative political world. once, here we can also unite with Beauvior the social construction of gender and its subordination is absolutely real. Even in the “progressive and enlightened world” the condition of woman does not escape the “Second Sex”. “The proletarians made the revolution in Russia, the blacks in Haiti, the Indo-Chinese are fighting in Indochina. Women’s actions have never been more than symbolic agitation; they have won only what men have been willing to concede to them; they have taken nothing, they have received”[11]
In the same direction we can locate to Margaret Atwood[12]. Atwood in her interview, “The Art of Fiction”[13], addresses the topic of the issue of Canadian national identity and defines it as follows “Canadian literature reflects the submissive as well as survivalist tendencies of the country, born from its being a subordinate ally to the United States, a former colony, and a country with vast stretches of untamed land.”[14] This view of Canada is quite revealing because it appears to inform Atwood’s fiction and poetry. Equally interesting isAtwood’s perception of “foreignness.” She writes, “Foreignness is all around. Only in the heart of the heart of the country, namely the heart of the United States, can you avoid such a thing. In the center of an empire, you can think of your experience as universal. Outside the empire or on the fringes of the empire, you cannot.”[15] I love this quote because it evokes the feelings I experienced when in my younger years I heard for the first time an Argentinian song called, “No me llames extranjero” (Do not call me a foreigner) by Rafael Amor. It is a strange sensation of feeling like the “other” as De Beauvoir calls it.
Finally, a word must be said about Atwood’s view of women. She is particularly critical of men who write female characters as if they were “stuffed furniture or sex aids.” Further to this point she writes “my early career … was determined by the images of women writers I was exposed to—women writers as genius suicides like Virginia Woolf. Or genius reclusive like Emily Dickinson and Christina Rossetti. Or doomed people of some sort, like the Brontës, who both died young… For a while I thought I had to choose between the two things I wanted: children and to be a writer. I took a chance.”[16] Her writing reveals a complex woman, a mixture of public intellectual in the old European tradition and a modern self-styled feminist.
The purpose of Atwood is to develop part of the main elements to build a theory of identity, and as in that scenario, the factors of gender, subordination, dependence, play a determining role when defining oneself. The interview, on which we are working, displays this analysis in a syntactic and complete way, a question that allows, after reading it, to draw a global panorama of their thought and history.
Gertrude Stein[17] bravely declares in the 1920s: “Also there is why is it [sic] that in this epoch the only real literary thinking has been done by women”[18]
From the time she moved to France in 1903 until her death in Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1946, American writer Gertrude Stein was a central figure in the Parisian art world. An advocate of the avant garde, Stein helped shape an artistic movement that demanded a novel form of expression and a conscious break with the past. A major American writer associated with literary Modernism and Cubist painting, Stein is noted for her avant-garde approach to language and literature. Rejecting patriarchal literary traditions, Stein produced novels, plays, and poetry known for their obscurity and characterized by multiplicity of meanings and absence of punctuation. Her most famous, and most successful, work is her 1933 autobiography The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, named for her lifelong companion.
Stain has an interesting and powerful reflection within his autobiography, which at the moment of reviewing it, links it with the private, silent and vital reflection that, a great majority of times, women do to write. This can join the creative, parallel and living world that for many years remained unknown, in the sphere of the non-existent and that was only conceived within the reserved space that women had to process their interests and expectations. “One of the things that I have liked all these years is to be surrounded by people who know no English. It has left me more intensely alone with my eyes and my English. I do not know if it would have been possible to have English be so all in all to me otherwise. And they none of them could read a word I wrote, most of them did not even know that I did write. No, I like living with so very many people and being all alone with English and myself.”[19]
From the southern hemisphere and the European Spanish-speaking world, women’s voices are counted by many, both in the present and past centuries.[20] The process of legitimation, recognition and spaces has not been different from that of the Anglo-Western world. Perhaps, only with an added difference, it has been even more difficult, since subordination as women and women within poor countries, politically dominated for the most part by dictatorships, with strong violent sexist legitimacy, different rates of education and access than the average in different geographical spaces, it has made this path even harder.
Sonia Montecinos is one of those voices[21]. Montecinos points out, “La década del 70 se va a caracterizar por ser la de la instalación de los Estudios de la Mujer en el universo académico formal; ello va a traer consigo una serie de consecuencias para las disciplinas de las Ciencias Sociales y las Humanidades provocando el surgimiento de nuevos campos de reflexión. Es así como en la Antropología, la Historia, la Literatura -entre las disciplinas más tocadas- se inaugura un proceso de cuestionamiento a los grandes relatos teóricos sustentados por ellas. Este cuestionamiento tuvo como primer horizonte sacar a escena la invisibilidad en que permanecía, en los diversos ámbitos del saber, la mujer. De ese modo, se gesta una relectura de las obras disciplinarias y se constata que en ellas las mujeres ya sea como objetos o como sujetos están ausentes.”[22] (The decade of the 70s was going to be characterized by the installation of Women’s Studies in the formal academic universe; This will bring with it a series of consequences for the disciplines of Social Sciences and Humanities, causing the emergence of new fields of reflection. This is how in Anthropology, History, Literature -among the disciplines most touched- a process of questioning the great theoretical accounts supported by them is inaugurated. This questioning had as its first horizon to bring out the invisibility in which women remained, in the various fields of knowledge. In this way, a rereading of the disciplinary works takes place and it is verified that in them women either as object or as subject are absent).
Sonia Montecinos in an extensive analysis, which covers the main points in the theoretical, linguistic and political construction of the presence or absence of women in life, understanding this duality, not as parity between “being an object” or “being a subject”, makes a connection impossible to miss.
She establishes in her arguments the solid relationship between the “world of orality” and the “female, maternal factor” as the space that has always been led by the female voice, from the intimate, from the open conversation, the transmission of knowledge and updating of life.
She gives this vital experience a space of relevance today and analyzes how from that oral accumulation of history, it allows to put that history in textuality. How much accumulated life there is in that experience and how it is possible to understand that the female voice spreads and consolidates, is the result of this process.
In other words, “this other voice” was always there, it was always in practice, it always grew, the central point was that for those who “made history, this voice did not exist.” Today that millenary and unique model is cracked and delegitimized, therefore, it is possible to hear all voices.
Reality is built a pulse. The reality is transformed step by step. Women have come a long travel, since the beginning of time. The successes achieved are not gifts from generous men, they are the fruit of hard work and perseverance, inexhaustible faith that having a voice is a point for which it is worth working.
“Mr. Vice President, I am Speaking”
Kamala Harris, Vice President-elect, United States 2020
VP debate, 2020 election campaign[5]
Multimedia Source
En la última semana, a miles de mujeres (la mayoría muy jóvenes) les ha dado por reunirse en plazas de Santiago de Chile, Ciudad de México, Madrid, Barcelona, París, Nueva York, Bruselas, Monterrey, Berlín o la pequeña y violenta Ecatepec (México). La secuencia siempre es la misma: se tapan los ojos con una venda negra y cuando empieza a sonar la música (una base electrónica pegadiza), cantan y bailan una sencilla coreografía. La canción, ya catapultada a himno feminista global, se titula Un violador en tu camino (también conocida como El violador eres tú), se ha viralizado rápidamente (los vídeos subidos a redes suman millones visionados) y la estrofa que se entona con más rabia es esta: «Y la culpa no era mía, ni dónde estaba, ni cómo vestía», una frase que miles mujeres han aprovechado para explicar episodios de violencia sexual vividos en carne propia, compartiendo en redes la edad, el sitio y la ropa que llevaban cuando fueron agredidas. Basta con hacer una búsqueda del hashtag #UnVioladorEnTuCamino para ver la magnitud del fenómeno.
(In the last week, thousands of women (most of them very young) have taken to meeting in squares of Santiago de Chile, Mexico City, Madrid, Barcelona, Paris, New York, Brussels, Monterrey, Berlin or the small and violent Ecatepec (Mexico). The sequence is always the same: they cover their eyes with a black blindfold and when the music starts to play (a catchy electronic base), they sing and dance a simple choreography. The song, already catapulted into a global feminist anthem, is titled A rapist on your way (also known as The rapist is you), it has quickly become viral (the videos uploaded to networks add up to millions of views) and the stanza that is sung with more anger is this: “And it was not my fault, or where I was, or how I dressed,” a phrase that thousands of women have used to explain episodes of sexual violence experienced firsthand, sharing in networks the age, the place and the clothes that they were wearing when they were attacked. Just do a search for the hashtag #UnVioladorEnTuCamino to see the magnitude of the phenomenon.
[1] Simone de Beauvior, The Second Sex, (New York, Vintage Books), 2011, IX.
[2] Simone de Beauvior, The Second Sex, XII.
[3] American politician and lawyer who is the elected vice president of the United States. She is a member of the Democratic Party, she will take office on January 20, 2021, along with President-elect Joe Biden, after defeating Donald Trump and Mike Pence in the 2020 elections. She will be the first Vice President of the United States and the highest-ranking elected official in United States history. Harris will also be the first Asian-American vice president and the first African-American.
[4] The United States needs to pass an Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) because this should be in the Constitution to protect all genders under the law. Women fought for equality before the law for decades. In this time, not only the women fight for equal rights, also many others groups fight today for the same issue. In fact, an Equal Right Amendment (ERA) was proposed, but it did not pass. Blacks and women have fought for civil and equal rights for more than 60 years.
[5] VP Debate, October 7, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQUagGCVdx8
[6] Simone de Beauvior, The Second Sex, 121.
[7] Reporter in the Washington bureau of the Boston Globe, currently covering the White House and national politics. Viser has written about a range of topics. He contributed several articles to the “Broken City” series, examining the impact of partisan gridlock on the judicial system. A graduate of the University of North Carolina, he has been at the Globe since 2004 and previously reported for the State House bureau, the City Hall bureau, and Globe West.
[8] Matt Viser, “Trump, Biden and masculinity in the age of coronavirus”, Washington Post, Oct. 15, 2020 at 11:45 p.m. EDT. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/masculinity-trump-biden/2020/10/15/e0646bf0-ff6d-11ea-9ceb-061d646d9c67_story.html
[9] Matt Viser, “Trump, Biden (…)”.
[10] Nina Renata Aron, “That time Norman Mailer brought his sexism to a debate and enraged women writers everywhere”, TimeLine, March 22, 2018. https://timeline.com/that-time-norman-mailer-was-being-sexist-f9f53f3de107
[11] Simone de Beauvior, The Second Sex, 8.
[12] Canadian writer Atwood is currently considered one of the most relevant female voices in the literary and political world. Internationally known for her novel “La Cola de la Criada” (1985), a chilling story about a puritan theocracy, remains valid in the development of themes related to Identity Theory, gender-feminism and political participation and empowerment.
[13] Mary Morris, Margaret Atwood, The Art of Fiction, the Paris Review, No. 121, Issue 117, Winter 1990 https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2262/the-art-of-fiction-no-121-margaret-atwood
[14] Mary Morris, Margaret Atwood, “The Art of Fiction.”
[15] Ibid.
[16] Ibid.
[17] Gertrude Stein. American author and poet best known for her modernist writings, extensive art collecting and literary salon in 1920s Paris.
[18] Katherine Mills Williams, “Sometime There is Breath”: Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons as Maternal Lexicon. Thesis. December 2013. https://wakespace.lib.wfu.edu/bitstream/handle/10339/39126/Williams_wfu_0248M_10505.pdf
Mills made this clarification: Carl Van Vechten cites this remark in the introduction to “Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein.” Unfortunately, he failed to verify this quotation, merely providing that “Miss Stein exclaims pleasurably somewhere or other” (xxiv). As Van Vechten was especially close with Stein, the statement may never have been published but rather recalled from conversation. Nevertheless, it provides important insight into Stein’s stance of women’s writing.
[19] Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, (New York, Penguin Press, 2020), 320, 148.
[20] Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Gabriela Mistral, Alfonsina Storni, María Luisa Bombal, Elena Garro, Blanca Varela, Isabel Allende, Rosario Castellanos, Alejandra Pizarnik, Clara Campoamor, Concha Méndez, Ana María Matute, Laura Esquivel, Elena Poniatoska, Gioconda Belli, Marcela Serrano, Julia Navarro, Almudena Grande and more.
[21] Montecinos is a Chilean writer and anthropologist. In 2013, she was awarded the National Prize of Social Science and Humanities. She has been an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology, Faculty of Social Sciences, and holder of the UNESCO Chair with a headquarter in the Interdisciplinary Center for Gender Studies of the aforementioned faculty, a center of which she was one of its founders and has been assistant director and director.
[22] Sonia Montecinos, Palabra Dicha. “Escritos sobre genero, identidades, mestizajes”. (Santiago, Coleccion de Libros Electronicos, Facultad de Ciencias Sociales, Universidad de Chile, 1997)
